The dirt path stretched seemingly for miles across the plains. Scraggly trees and knobby little hills occasionally broke up the monotony of the landscape. It was boring as all hell, and Yuuri had taken to playing the world's most specific game of "I spy". With his horse.
"I spy, uh, a knobby little hill with a tree growing on it—"
Gwendal snorted and lifted a hoof in the direction of a knobby little hill with a tree growing on it.
"—no. No, Gwendal, I haven't finished yet. A tree growing on it and a hole in the side, like a rabbit burrow."
Gwendal, who had continued trotting down the path as Yuuri spoke, scanned his eyes across their surroundings and then lifted his other hoof.
"Yeah," Yuuri said. "Okay." He was playing a kiddy road trip game with a horse. Everything was going just fine, thank you for asking. "Okay, I guess I'll go again," he said, because Gwendal was a horse and, though oddly intelligent, still couldn't talk. He sighed and began looking again.
In truth, things were decidedly not fine in Yuuri's life. His family was minor nobility (very, very minor) and were only reminded of their status when something important happened at the castle for which all the nobility were notified. The prince was looking to be married, and all of marriageable age were pressed to be in attendance at court that fateful day.
It was not the first time the prince had looked for a spouse, but it was the largest gathering thus far. Before, they had invited foreign royalty. When that failed, they called only the high nobles, and then it went lower and lower until even the Shibuya family were invited. The queen was at her wit's end: she couldn't pass off the crown until her son was married because they lived in a shitty kingdom where shitty rules like this existed. There had once been other princes, but no one knew where they had gone, and the general populace was not told what grisly fates they might have met.
The sole remaining prince, meanwhile, had gained a reputation for being impossible to please. He challenged his suitors to duels and soundly thrashed them. "No, he's too weak." He challenged them to complete quests in his name to prove their sincerity. "I'm not chaining myself to a woman who can't properly slay a goala!"
It was no surprise that Prince Wolfram had taken one look at all the young men and women gathered there and promptly said, "No. They're all wimps."
Many had not taken kindly to that. Some huffed off, some cried - whether the tears were true or shed to elicit sympathy was unknown - and Yuuri had just rolled his eyes. Of course he didn't like being called a wimp, but everyone already knew Prince Wolfram was a harsh man, quick with his words and difficult to befriend. Why anyone thought they would be the exception was beyond him. It smacked of pure narcissism.
Yuuri's older brother, Shori, was obsessed with furthering their family's station, but even he had crossed his arms and scowled as Prince Wolfram so casually dismissed them all.
"This is a waste of time," Shori said. "I could be studying or making business contacts. I can't believe they have the gall to force us all here to listen to some brat whine about how he's too good for us."
Shori was right, but what could they do? When the royal family called, they came. Yuuri was just glad he had ducked out of the pumpkin pants their mother had tried to dress him in. (She said they made him look refined. Yuuri was sure they were her revenge for him having realized he was a boy sometime in his sixth summer.) He turned to his brother to commiserate.
Of course, that was the exact moment that a hell-beast broke into the crowd. The horse's coat was a gray so dark it was almost black, and its eyes were like sapphires. It was an evil thing, and when it stomped, its hooves made the ground shake.
Shori's reflexes were quick; he dodged to the side, as did many others. There was screaming, which Yuuri heard distantly, and the prince, who'd been about to leave, rushed back to survey the scene. Yuuri froze up in fear as the monster horse stomped up to him and snorted evil-horse-breath into his face. It smelled like hay and… sugar?
It was but one of many stupid things Yuuri had done in his life. He reached into his pockets and took out the cookies he'd been saving for later and gave them to the demonic creature that…
...calmly ate from his hand.
"Gwendal!" The prince approached the two of them. "What are you doing here?"
Gwendal, as the horse was called, nudged Yuuri's shoulder and snorted in the prince's direction. Prince Wolfram narrowed his eyes, but he seemed to be considering whatever telepathic proposition the horse had beamed into his mind, or so Yuuri thought. His hands were getting sweaty and they were covered in cookie crumbs. Yuuri brushed them off on his pants before he remembered that he was in the presence of royalty and probably should take more care with his manners but—
"You," the prince said, pointing at Yuuri. "I will allow you to court me."
"Huh? But what if I don't want—" Yuuri was cut off as the prince glared and, summoned by said glare, a guard suddenly took up residence behind Yuuri and pressed the business end of his spear at Yuuri's backside. "Um, know," Yuuri amended. "What if I don't know how to court someone. That's what I meant to say."
The prince grumbled something under his breath that sounded like, "What kind of absolute tool of a nobleman's son doesn't know how to court someone?" Then he said aloud, "It's simple: you will go on a quest, and you are to do it alone. No other person may aid you."
"Quest. Yeah, sure. I can do quests… I think." The guard prodded Yuuri's butt with the pointy spear. Yuuri added a pained smile and hoped his sweating wasn't too obvious. "What do you want me to do? (Ow!) I mean, how may I serve you? (Ow! Cut that out!) Your Highness."
His Highness, glaring down imperiously, harrumphed. "Bring me a troll. Alive."
On the sidelines, Shori and the others had gathered around to watch the spectacle. They whispered amongst themselves, though quite a few strains filtered through. Most assumed that the prince had found an interesting plaything and was trying to make an example out of Yuuri to punish them all for even thinking they might be worthy of his hand. Yuuri had no idea what was going on at all. He just barely resisted the urge to put his face in his palms. This day just could not get more unfortunate.
"Why do you want a troll? (I swear to god if you poke me with that thing one more time I'll shove it up your—!)"
Wolfram pointedly ignored the guard's jabs in favor of lecturing Yuuri on the merits of troll-baiting. "A troll is the perfect target. To overcome one, you must either have great strength or great wit, and you cannot be lacking too much in the other. Perhaps you could outwit a troll, but without strength, how would you bring it back? Or you could attempt to take it by force from the very beginning, but without wits, how would you solve the riddle so that the troll lets down his guard? Trolls are very wary of those travellers who think they can just march on through without solving the riddle. I've never heard of anyone successfully crossing a troll's bridge by strength alone."
Yuuri pondered the arduous task before him and replied thusly to the prince: "...Can I not?"
A gasp rose from the crowd. They held their breaths at this stupid boy's daring. Yuuri was having an adrenaline-fueled out-of-body experience which didn't so much feel like he was floating as it did that his brain-to-mouth filter had been incinerated and damn the consequences.
Prince Wolfram smiled grimly. "I'll lend Gwendal to you."
That was the end of Yuuri's protests (to the prince's face, at least). Shori shot out and silenced Yuuri before he could call the prince any names that would get him thrown in a dungeon. He bowed and scraped and said, "Yuuri swears on our family's honor that he'll get that troll for you," and then he'd dragged them all the way back to their guest rooms at the castle where their mother gushed over her baby Yuu-chan's heroic questing.
After his mom got involved, that was it. Yuuri found himself here, travelling down the endless plains in search of a troll, with none but a horse for company.
"I spy… a scraggly tree with a broken branch— No, Gwendal, let me finish. A broken branch and its roots are poking out of the ground."
Gwendal began looking around, but before he could find the scraggly tree with a broken branch and roots poking out of the ground, Yuuri couldn't take it anymore and threw his hands up in the air with an exasperated growl.
"Argh! I don't even want to marry the prince! Why am I doing this, Gwendal?"
Gwendal snorted disdainfully as if to say, "Because you're stupid."
"Don't you 'because you're stupid' me. I'm questioning my life choices here. You could at least pretend to be supportive."
Gwendal continued to look unimpressed as if to say, "I'm a goddamned horse, you lunatic."
"Don't you— Ugh. Screw you, Gwendal. You're the one who got me into this mess in the first place."
Gwendal rolled his big horsey eyes as Yuuri continued to rant.
"And anyway, how are we supposed to find a troll? We went through all the villages and looked at their bridges, but apparently trolls don't hang out where there are a lot of people. Or maybe it's the other way around. Whatever. There are no trolls in the villages except that one kid who tried to pawn off her little brother as one. So we just set off and now we're in the middle of nowhere, and what? There's just suddenly going to pop up a bridge, and there'll be a troll standing there? No way!"
Yuuri had ranted on for what seemed like forever when Gwendal bucked to get his attention. He looked up to see a stream… and a bridge spanning the width of the stream… and a troll. Just standing there.
"Hello," said the oddly polite troll. "My name is Conrad and I'm the trollkeeper of this bridge. You'll need to answer a riddle to pass."
He - Yuuri assumed the troll was male - was a hulking creature the height of two men and the width of four. He had skin as gray and rough as a rock, and a sharp pair of horns twisted up from the patch of damp moss that was his hair.
Yuuri's jaw dropped and his mouth went dry. He would have said something except that there was nothing to say. His hands might or might not have flopped around distressingly in a gesture that the troll took as a sign to proceed.
"What do you call an alligator in a vest?"
The only thing Yuuri could squeak out was, "I don't like where this is going."
The troll, Conrad - and seriously, what kind of name for a troll was Conrad? - waited for a response, eyes sparkling in anticipation. When he sensed that nothing more was forthcoming, he answered his own query: "An investigator."
"That's not much of a riddle, it's just a pun," Yuuri said with a frown.
Conrad shrugged. "There's a fine line."
"No, there really isn't."
Conrad seemed not to care. He continued smiling. "Let's try a different one then. How does one make Holy water?"
"I… don't know. Get a priest to bless it?"
"Well, yes, if you want to be boring."
"I do, actually. I want to be boring."
"I suppose the answer is satisfactory for bridge-crossing purposes, though are you sure you wouldn't like to try guessing?"
"Very sure."
"...Oh. I'll just tell you then!"
"No, please don't."
"To make Holy water, you—"
"No, don't."
"—boil the Hell out of it."
Yuuri sobbed a little on the inside.
He also sobbed on the outside.
Many pun-related shenanigans later, the troll finally acquiesced to leaving his trollbooth after Yuuri assured him that he would let the fine people at the capitol know that the trollway needed repairs, and really, it would be a good idea to widen it, maybe carve out a few more lanes for traffic, and could the Department of Trollsportation also be notified that automated trollbooths are where it's at?
Yuuri's quest, far from involving strength and cunning, actually only required an inhuman ability to take pun-ishment. He mumbled - perhaps to Gwendal, perhaps to himself - that he was obviously such a self-flagellating creep he might as well have been born a bacterium. So he could have. An actual flagellum with which to beat himself. Ba-dum-cha!
Okay, that was horrible. As in even worse than any of Conrad's puns, and those were already very bad.
Gwendal, who always seemed to understand Yuuri even when he hadn't spoken aloud, tilted his head to the side. Eukaryotes?
No, Gwendal, we're out of oats until the next village.
Conrad, for all that his jokes were the verbal equivalent of receiving ten lashes - tongue lashes, if you will - wasn't bad for a rock-person-troll-thing. He spoke to Gwendal as if they were old acquaintances. It was rare for Yuuri to encounter someone else who felt as he did about Gwendal, and they used their mutual respect for Gwendal's human-like intelligence and scathing non-verbal sarcasm to become something like friends.
It was with a bit of dread that Yuuri returned to the castle, for he had begun feeling attached to his companions, the troll and the horse. He would never wish anything untoward to happen to Conrad, who was the nicest troll anyone could ever meet. He feared that he would be commanded to kill the monster to prove his martial prowess, or that Conrad would be cast into slavery. And as for Gwendal, the horse would return to the royal stables. Should Yuuri have a falling out with the prince, they would never meet again.
Of course he couldn't forget his own looming fate. What would it mean, he wondered, that he had come back successful in his quest? Would Prince Wolfram honestly accept him as a suitor? Would marriage truly be a possibility? Yuuri had never wanted to be more than what he was, so it was nerve wracking to consider that he might one day be the king's consort and that it would be a position he gained because Prince Wolfram was a brat who couldn't pick a suitor the regular way instead of sending some random chump on a quest.
As they crossed through the forest surrounding the castle, Yuuri purposely slowed their pace. One could say he was dithering, even. And it was as he was dithering that their party came upon the very prince that Yuuri had been reluctant to meet.
Prince Wolfram sat atop his shining white steed; he had come galloping down from the castle to intercept them, and as such was a bit flushed and out of breath. The first words out of the handsome prince's mouth were, "Why's he still a troll?"
Yuuri rubbed at his eyes to make sure that he was seeing correctly, which he was. He checked his ears to make sure he was hearing correctly, which he was, and then he responded with, "What?"
"Conrad," Prince Wolfram pointed out as if Yuuri were slower than a footless snail, "is still a troll."
"Because," Yuuri spoke back, enunciating his words as if Wolfram were slower than a tranquilized sloth, "you asked for a troll." Behind him, Conrad and Gwendal shared Significant Looks. "I mean, what else would I bring you? You don't go around giving people tables when they ask for chairs, do you?"
"I don't go around giving any sort of furniture to people because I have servants to do that because I'm a prince."
"You say that but all I hear is 'bluh bluh I'm a prick'."
Yuuri and Wolfram had both dismounted at this point, and Yuuri's infamous motor mouth was running at full speed because there were no guards here to poke him when he got a little too fresh with royalty.
Gwendal was dismayed at the childish level to which the conversation had sunk. Conrad could tell because he had a… long face. (Ba-dum-cha!)
"Kiss the troll!" Wolfram was shouting.
"Why would I— No!"
"Kiss him!"
"Hell no!"
"Kiss him he's a prince he'll turn into a prince!"
Yuuri had sucked in a large breath in preparation for launching a stream of verbal vitriol in Wolfram's direction, but in light of this new revelation he now kept it and turned slightly blue in the face as he attempted to parse the meaning of those words.
He sighed, deflating with a rather loud pwah~ and said, "What is up with you princes, seriously. Always getting cursed. How would you even know that if you sent me out to get a troll, I'd come back with the right one?"
"There's only one troll in the kingdom," Wolfram said. He was not impressed, as evidenced by a sardonic eyebrow-raise.
Yuuri ignored this and asked Conrad instead. "Why would anyone want to curse you?"
Conrad smiled. "In my case, it was something about being too 'pun-ctilious in my riddlediculousness'."
It was so cold, the way he said it. Always with that damn unreadable smile. Yuuri's lips puckered up, and not like he was going in for a kiss, but like he'd just eaten a whole lemon. He did, however, actually go in for a kiss like that, sour-lemon-pucker and all, just snogged the hell out of Troll Conrad's rocky face until he wasn't a troll anymore. It was an interesting experience.
Wolfram appeared flushed again, but from embarrassment rather than tiredness or anger. The color was high up his cheeks as he greeted his long-lost brother. "Oh, thank god you're back!" he proclaimed. "Ahem. Conrad, seeing as I'm now the younger prince again, it would be best if you would begin your wedding plans at once."
If Conrad was surprised, he hid it with his usual aplomb. "I'm afraid that's not possible, for I live the dangerous life of a knight errant; no one would want to be married to me. And I've a lead I must follow, regarding Gwendal's case…"
"Oh no you don't! My god, Conrad, don't you know that the answer is always just a kiss? You don't get to foist your princely duties onto me to run off on an adventure and get cursed into a troll again!"
Wolfram's complaint was oddly specific, but it was something else that Yuuri was curious about. "Wait a minute, guys… What do you mean by 'Gwendal's case'? He's just a horse, isn't he? Uh, a remarkably intelligent horse, but still..."
Gwendal rolled his big horsey eyes in tandem with Wolfram's. Their expressions were eerily similar.
"He's our eldest brother," Conrad helpfully supplied. "You know, the one I'm sure you must have heard about going missing."
"...I've been riding your brother this whole time? I've been riding the crown prince this whole time?!"
Gwendal shook his head like he couldn't believe someone could be so stupid and still have survived past infancy when he should arguably have choked to death on his own idiot saliva.
"He's the most stable of us."
"Shut up shut up shut up oh my god."
"Kiss the horse, wimp."
"No no shut up no."
He snogged the horse anyway, and returned triumphant with the three princes at his side.
A/N: If this and the previous fic "Plus ça change" are any indication, I write really weird fics when I'm sick. Weirder than usual, even. (I'm not sorry, though. I'm so not sorry that I decided to dig this up after I got better and am arguably of sound mind.)
Um, this one sprang up from a short story translation I did a long-ass while ago where Conrad trolled Yuuri. I called him Troll-rad, and a few people were like "lol yes Troll-rad is awesome" and I DON'T KNOW why I thought back on this now, but hey, Troll-rad deserved a fic of his own. And now he has one.
Or maybe I just really wanted to write Yuuri riding Gwendal all over the place. (Like, the behind-the-scenes ending of this fic is that Yuuri and non-horse Gwendal get married, and Yuuri still rides him all over the place. Fur real. Oh, ick, shitty pun is shitty.)